


dead woods, bleeding souls

by VerdantMoth



Series: The Dead Woods [1]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Style, Getting Together, M/M, Moving On, Not Canon Compliant, Tell Me, Unrequited Crush, ghost - Freeform, haunted forest, idk - Freeform, if I should've tagged a thing, seriously, what is canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 13:39:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19746868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Bucky adds, “I haven’t seen him once. I followed a boy into the Dead Woods, because I thought I loved him. Turns out, he didn’t love me back. That boy was no boy. He'd gone and grown up on me, and fallen in love with someone else entirely. ”





	dead woods, bleeding souls

There were a lot of curious things in the Dead Woods. Legends half true, ghost who wanted to hide. Heroes who went to die. 

James knew this. That’s why he went. ‘Cause when the grand love of your life sauntered in to rescue who he thought might be the love of his life, well, what was a kid from the sooty streets to do, but follow?

He didn’t start trailing too far behind in the Dead Woods. He started in the trenches. But somehow, someway, he always knew it would lead him here.

The entrance opened up to him, small, innocuous, easy to find after decades of looking and he almost laughed at the sunlight that filtered through the trees. 

They’re beautiful, the haunted woods, and he hated them already.

—

When James was a kid, snot nosed and bruise-eyed, his sister whispered about a magic place. She called it the Dead Woods, and said the name made it sound more tragic than it was. 

“It’s just a place to rest, really. Everyone wants to rest eventually. Even gods and heroes and the dead who never leave us. It’s safe, for them.” She packed ice onto James’ eye, looked at him with that intense-but-distant gaze; the one where he could tell she was in that dreamy land she often escaped too. 

“Sometimes, Little Jamie, you can call one back from the Dead Woods. But it’s never quite who you expect to bring home, and that’s why you must be careful. You must never go on a whim, and you must never go alone. ” She’s so far away, ice dripping down her elbow, that James gently pushed her hand away and curled her into her lap. She hummed, an old lullaby learned from their grandmother, from the old lands, and stroked his hair and he waited for her to come back. 

He should’ve known then, but James wasn’t one for fairytales. 

—

The sun never sleeps in the Dead Woods, and James wants to know how any creature does. He’s curled beneath lichen and leaf-rot, and unsure of the day, but he knows, he  _ knows _ , Steve is around here somewhere.

Phantom whispers, half-images. 

The smell of self-righteous justice. 

“Steve!” He screams, until his throat is raw and bloody and the world is spinning and the sun.

Christ, the sun that never stops fracturing against the leaves. 

He misses the trenches. The noise of men and artillery and mud squelching in cracked boots.

Everything in the Dead Woods is off center, almost quiet. Birds hum, instead of sing. Sticks don’t crunch, so much as smush and squelch. Even his own screams sound miles away. 

It’s too warm here, too, nothing like the cold ice of the Northern Front. Nothing like the fingers of winter seeping into the knees of his trousers, his coat cuffs. 

He strips down until he’s tramping the woods in his socks, his undershirt, and his briefs. 

“Stevie, please,” he whispers. He doesn’t know how many days or nights or weeks or months it’s been. Years, maybe.

Something shifts to his left and James starts, chases a golden flash and a laughter that’s all wrong. 

It’s not Steve. Too short, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist in a similar way, but this blond moves with an acrobat's grace. 

“Stevie?” James whispers.

Mischievous blue eyes, the wrong shade of jean, and a beard smirk back at him. Something hits Bucky in the shoulder,  _ the bad shoulder _ , and the world goes topsy-turvy; kaleidoscope purples exploding around him and he sleeps,  _ finally. _

It’s nice, the rest, the breath of someone off to the side. 

It should bother him, he knows, but somehow the forest makes more sense with someone beside him. Everything feels a little more real, almost solid.

He likes not being alone in this maze.

—

He wakes to a lullaby he hasn’t heard in too long, and long dark hair drifting just out of sight between the trunks. 

“Becca?” He gasps. 

The lullaby cuts off with a screech, dark hair goes ashen and the woods tremble. The figure turns and her eyes are the same warm brown he remembers, more present than he ever thinks they were beyond swaying trees. 

“Little Jamie,” she sings at him, “come to play where the dead are sleeping?” 

“I followed someone here, a man. I’m looking for him,” James hesitates, unsure of how to explain it to her. “He’s everything to me, Becca.” 

She laughs, wrong, gravel and glass colliding, and shakes her head. “If you loved him, and he you, then the Dead Woods would bring you together.”

James frowns, stepping towards her even as she dances away from him. “Why did you go, Becca?”

The question spills beneath them, sudden and startling, and her grin grows dark and twisted. “The Dead Woods called me, Bucky boy. Called me to their swinging branches.” She frowns, rubs a hand across her neck. “He’s here, and I’ll find him, and we’ll sleep beautiful together.” 

She’s gone then, nothing but wispy memories and hazy blue smoke and a baby’s cry screaming in James’ ears. 

—

He sees Not-Steve a lot. Especially on the days when he shoulder aches and his phantom fingers tremble. Not-Steve never says anything, or comes close to him, but he moves his fingers like he thinks he’s talking. 

James just stares at him until his eyes go cotton and ancient tragedies screech like broken strings in his ears. 

He chases ghost about the woods, red-hair from a life he likes not to remember, blue-eyes that are forever the wrong shade. A curtain of dark hair that mocks him, teases him, entices him. 

He tries to remember all of the stories of the Dead Woods. 

Confusion, he remembers, confusion in every story. Memories and ghosts and the dead alive and the living busy dying.

Invites and exiles and no one ever entering the Dead Woods unless the Dead Woods wanted them. 

Once, when he remembers being thirsty, but doesn’t think he is, he asks Not-Steve, “Who’re you chasing?” 

Not-Steve smiles, moves his hands. He must see the confusion on James’ face. “A girl I must say thanks to,” he answers, quiet. His voice sounds like fresh hay rolling and it soothes something in James. 

He nods, thinks about the faces he’s seen. He frowns, thinking of cutting red-hair. “She doesn’t like to feel indebted,” James whispers.

The man has already left. 

—

He’s never thirsty or hungry here, never needs to relieve himself which is nice, all things considered. But sometimes he remembers those feelings. Remembers a hunger so deep his bones rattled with it, a thirst so intense his skin flaked off. 

He only finds the river when he needs to bath, and he only finds Not-Steve when loneliness threatens to swallow him whole. When the maze of the woods is so twisted he thinks he might lose himself in it.

Becca finds him sometimes. She never really says anything to him, and he thinks it’s fitting, given how much she said to him when she raised him. Sometimes she sways, arms held tight around her belly and sings lullabies from a land James saw when he was too mud-caked to appreciate it. 

“Can you rest?” He asks her once. 

“Am I not resting now?” She asks back. And he thinks, as he watches her, cornflowers and ivy braided into her hair, maybe she is. 

Heaven never did appeal to the girl who grew up too fast. 

“Will you ever find him?” James asks, even though he never really did know who “he” was. 

There’s a dark gleam in Becca’s eyes, “When I’m ready to.”

A chill skitters down James’ back, something dark in her voice that makes him think she  _ wants _ to be caught here. 

“How do I get out?” He demands. 

“Why, by finding what the Dead Woods called you for.” 

Becca is gone before James can blink, and he gets a feeling he won’t be seeing her for a long time. 

—

“He’s searching for you, Little Widow,” James tells a girl with vibrant red hair. She’s gotten so big since he pulled her from a flaming stage. 

“He wants to apologize,” she says, voice lilting and rough.

James tilts his head. “I don’t know about that,” but he doesn’t argue with her too much. Instead he hums, “Why are you here?”

She smiles, sad eyes still singing a swan song, and says, “Because I loved him, and I need to make sure he’s happy before I go.” 

“And me?” He looks at her, with the same seriousness he had when he lifted her onto a cart and told her to be quiet until the road ran smooth.

She fits her hand to his jaw, eyes far too knowing, even for her woman’s body. “You’ve always chased him, Bucky. But he’s never been  _ it _ for you. You just never let yourself see it.”

She kisses his cheek, and he almost asks,  _ were you it?  _

But when she evaporates to the sound of smooth feet over grass he knows the answer.

—

“She’s never going to say good-bye to me, is she?” 

James shrugs. “What’s your name?” He asks instead. 

The blond eyes, him, scratches at his beard still dripping with luke-warm lake water. “Clint. And you?” 

“Bucky,” he says. Clint’s eyes narrow, dangerous, almost angry, and he does that thing again, fires something at Bucky’s shoulder that makes fire shoot through his torso and the tree tops spin and the stars slice down Bucky's suddenly parched throat. 

—

He spends a long time alone, wandering timeless and tired and unable to sleep. 

Berries bloom about his head, and he swallows them, finds them bitter between his teeth in a way that infuriates him. 

He wants out. He wants out of the ever-sunny woods full of ghostly laughter and cruel memories that hold him desperate. 

Clint stalks him. 

Bucky can hear his quiet footfalls, can hear his breath when they run the never-ending maze. Sometimes he can hear the blond man cry, and a part of him wants to go to him, wants to…

He doesn’t like what he wants, so he stalks Clint. Hunts him from the ground, when the other man flits among the trees. 

Always out of reach, always a flash just beyond his vision. 

Bucky almost forgets why he first broke through the entrance. 

—  


Clint falls on him.

More accurately, Bucky knocks him from the tree and doesn’t move fast enough below him.

Clint is heavy, much more than Bucky expected, given his frame. He knew the man was muscle, broad shouldered and thick thighed, but he’s also use to the weight of Super Steve. 

“You’re surprisingly solid,” Bucky grunts as he shoves Clint off him.

Clint gives him a peculiar look. “Did you expect otherwise?”

Bucky sighs, “Well, the rules of the Dead Woods aren’t exactly set in stone, but all of the other ghost haven’t really been… corporeal.” It's not quite true, if he thinks about Becca's arms soft around him, Natasha's hand faint against his cheek. But still. 

Clint laughs then, laughs loud and hard and long until Bucky’s cheeks are flush and his belly tight with the sound. 

“I’m as alive as you are, Mr. Buchanan. And as haunted to boot.” 

Bucky kicks the dirt, digs the toe of his boot in until he has a nice little hole. “I suppose in someway all the things here are.” 

Clint shrugs. “Depends on how you define alive, I guess. But I’ll tell you this, my gal ain’t alive at all.” 

“Perhaps you should let her go?” Bucky says. Whispers. And he’s not sure why he offers up the idea, why he pushes the thought, but he doesn’t like the idea of Clint pinning after a gal long gone. 

“It’s not like that,” Clint says. He’s angry, pushing up and shoving past branches in his way. “You wouldn’t get it, you know.” 

Bucky follows him, nearly stumbling over the roots that spring up out of nowhere. “I just meant, she’d want you to be happy, move on.” 

Clint whirls about, shoves a finger in Bucky’s chest suddenly close and in his face. 

His breath smells sweet, like bread and honey, and Bucky knows that’s an odd detail to latch onto when he’s got a red face spitting in his own. 

“What would you know about moving on? Huh? Chasing a ghost that’s not even in the forest anymore.”

Bucky grabs his arm, squeezes tight enough to feel the bone shift, “What do you know about Steve?” 

Clint’s eyes soften, but his mouth is still sharp. “He came in, found his gal, and they left together. They went were even our ghost can’t follow.” 

Bucky lets him go, doesn’t watch as he leaves. 

—

Natasha finds him again, hands on her hips and chin lifted. “You’ve done it now, Bucky-boy.” 

“Done what?” he grumbles from where he’s laying, arm over his eyes. 

“Clint is stalking about these woods shrieking like a goddamned banshee. I’m going to have to see him now, have to say good-bye, just so the others can relax.” 

Her voice quivers and Bucky sits up, pats the earth beside him. “Tell me about it?”

She sets, rest her cold head on his shoulder and shrugs. “We loved each other, Barton and I. Loved each other deep and whole and complete. But not the right kind of love. We weren’t exactly each other’s type.” 

Bucky snorts, because he’s well aware of Natasha’s  _ type _ . She pinches him hard in the ribs, and goes on. “But we had each other’s back, always. And then…” she hesitates. “Do you remember telling me about the time it was you or Steve?” 

He nods. 

“It really was me or him, this time. And I knew he’d try to be the one. So I,” Natasha goes quiet. “I snuck off, I did what I had too.”

“Why?” Bucky asks. 

She looks at him, death eyes wet and soft, “Because I’d had love, Bucky. I’d experienced it, and lost it. Clint, he thinks he’s know what it is to surrender everything to another, but he’s never let himself go.”

“And you think he deserves a chance to be hurt that way?” Bucky scoffs.

Natasha smiles at him, kisses his cheek softly, “He’s not the only one who needs to open his heart, Bucky. Not the only one who needs to feel.”

When she hugs him, it’s goodbye, so he kisses her cheek even as it fades and they both pretend they aren’t crying.

—

Becca finds him again, well after Natasha has vanished. She looks radiant and Bucky stares in awe. 

She doesn’t look at all haunted, but he feels so small, when she wraps her tiny frame about him. She's almost warm, almost a heavy weight in his arms.

“Oh Little Jamie, why are you here?” 

“To find Steve,” he answers immediately. But it isn’t true. It hasn’t really been true since long before he learned where Steve had gone. 

Becca’s hands grip his jaw, tight like when she used to wipe the blood from his lips. “Little Jamie,” she warns. She wipes his brow and tucks his hair behind his ears. 

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “But Becca, why are you here?” 

She smiles at him, sad and lost. “A sister always makes sure her brother’s okay before she goes away.” 

And something about that, the thought of Becca humming through these woods for  _ so long _ s breaks him. Shatters something in his chest he didn’t know he had. “Becca, darling,” he says, holding her tight. “You don’t have to look out for me anymore. I’m all grown up now. You can be free.” 

Becca hugs him tight, too tight, and a baby screams about his head, but he hears her whisper, “I’m scared Jamie.” This he thinks, might be the real reason the Dead Woods let him in. That's why he can feel her, can smell the jasmine and milk he remembers from his boyhood.

Flashes, a dark hallway, gunshots echoing, a baby that won’t quiet, white powder, a sister waiting, waiting, waiting. An explosion no one saw coming. 

“I’m sorry, Becca. Word came too late,” He says, desperate for her to hear him. 

“I know. I know, but I’m so scared,” she whispers. 

He can feel it, taste it, just like the memories. 

“You’ve been scared your whole life, darlin', taking care of everyone around you. But you don’t have to anymore, do you?” 

Becca steps away from him, and Bucky stares into the hazel eyes of a tiny babe, strokes wispy red hair. 

“You can go, raise him. Don’t worry about me, Becca,” he presses a gentle finger to the soft cheek. “What did you name him?” 

Becca smiles at him, “Bastian.” She stares at her son for a long time, then presses her fingers to his cheek. “You know how to leave the woods, Jamie. Find him, and be as free as we are.”

Like mist she vanishes, leaving him alone.

He sinks to his knees, tears fierce down his cheeks, wails into the sky that’s finally gone dusky.

—

He and Clint circle each other for a long time. They’re chasing each other’s shadow, and some nameless thing they don’t want to deal with. 

Clint’s eyes are rimmed-red, making the blue gleam like polished stone, and his beard glitters in the fading sun. 

Bucky grows nervous, bits and pieces of mythos swirling about his mind.

He's been here too long, grown accustomed to the faint trickles of ghostly laughter. 

Night is falling, and no one leaves the Dead Woods once the moon has risen. 

“Why?” He screams into the air. “Let me  _ go _ if he isn’t here!”

“Who?” 

The voice startles Bucky. Scares him so bad he loses his footing in the moss on the ground and slides right into the lake. He comes up spluttering, and Clint is laughing. He’s laughing, but there’s something hesitant in his posture. 

“Whoever the Dead Woods wanted me to find,” Bucky says petulantly. “I thought it was Steve. I was sure I was going to get to say goodbye to Steve.”

Clint waits, patiently, until Bucky adds, “But I haven’t seen him once. I followed a boy into the Dead Woods, because I thought I loved him. Turns out, he didn’t love me back. That boy was no boy. He'd gone and grown up on me, and fallen in love with someone else entirely. ” 

Clint joins him in the muddy water, bumps his shoulder. “Not the way the Woods knew you wanted, anyway.” 

Bucky gives him a wry grin. “Why’re you still here? Isn’t Natasha gone?”

Clint eyes him. “Yeah.” Then he throws his hands up, “She wasn’t wrong about you being dense though, was she?” He grabs Bucky’s face in thick and calloused hands and pulls him into a kiss that taste like bread and honey and dominance, and Bucky sinks right into it. 

—

When they break apart, the sky is dark, faint stars trying to shine behind the clouds. There’s no forest around them, only the screaming sounds of night frogs and crickets and cars rumbling along the road. 

“Shit,” Clint whistles. “Where are we?” 

“New Orleans, I think,” Bucky answers. 

Neither of them entered the Dead Woods here, but it makes sense they’d be kicked out of a haunted forest right into the arms of a haunted town. 

Clint takes Bucky’s hand like it’s easy. Like it means nothing and everything, and says, “Cool. I know a guy here. He likes card tricks and magic,  _ real magic _ , but he’ll let us crash. Might even be able to fix that empty shoulder of yours.” He kisses Bucky’s cheek, then his nose, and then his mouth until a Queen drapes hazy beads about their necks. 

They go to find a magic man, the blessings of a redhead and a sister-gone-mother hanging about their shoulders, and a whole world to explore, untangling this strange new thing between them. 

Bucky thinks it’s odd, how he was born in the soot, raised in the trenches, lost in the woods, and found among throngs of witches and gamblers, but with Clint’s hands fast around his own it almost makes sense. 


End file.
